For a second I thought this post would be about Mechaton the game of Giant Fighty (Lego) Robots.

You guys should have done this when TF2 was new. At least at that time, the game had some resemblance to a game of skill. The recent patches have pretty much taken it down the road of being an incredibly easy game of silliness.

Don't mind me. I've been mourning the loss of quality difficult fpses ever since Tribes 2 was patched to death.

I am not a lawyer.

I remember reading about a case, I think in Texas. The situation was thus. The building code had a particular requirement in it, but in order to fulfill that requirement, you had to know something that was a trade secret of this one company. The company obviously wanted to have a monopoly on construction of buildings, so they said they couldn't tell people the trade secret.

The judge ended up saying that the law has to be public. How can people be expected to follow the law, if they can't find out what the law is? Being ignorant of the law is not an excuse because it is the responsibility of the citizens to know the law. However, if the laws are kept secret, it becomes impossible for the citizens to uphold their responsibility, and therefore they can not be held responsible.

The laws being made public is as fundamentally important to a free, open, democratic society as is habeas corpus and other such things.

Please post the logs of the interview afterward!

I can't applaud enough!

If you are Christian, you're monotheist right? So even if it is an homage to Baal, what does it matter? Ball doesn't exist right? Or are you not a monotheist?

I was at Penguicon 2.0. It was a huge blast. I would definitely go back, except I live five hours further away than I used to.

If this is true, why can't I get any VC?

I think the problem is that tech businesses are run by tech people, like myself, who know nothing about business. If I could get some VC, I could start a company and do awesome stuff. The problem is we have no business knowledge, so we don't know how to get VC.

If VC people want more businesses to invest in, they need to send business people to go find tech people. I know many tech people like myself who would love to pursue our personal projects as new businesses, but we don't even know the first thing about incorporating, or anything. We end up just getting full time jobs working for someone else, and doing our personal stuff as a hobby in our spare time.

This is the greatest thing I have seen all day.

I went to this park when it was open, so these photos are pretty awesome.

Katie Cook for the win.

Why didn't he just lock his door? Also, even if I saw a Craigslist ad saying "everything must go" I wouldn't take anything until the person at the house confirmed it.

Much of the blame for the economic crisis does fall on these people, and a great deal also falls on the underwriters. However, I don't see anyone putting any blame whatsoever on the financially irresponsible people who got these mortgages. I'm not saying it's all their fault, but when you have someone who goes and gets a loan they can not afford to pay back, then uses it to buy something they can't afford at all, you can't say that wasn't part of the problem.

Church better get working then. They are guilty of #5 and #6 for sure.

Unlike all the other supposed herbal preparations (I won't dignify them by calling them remedies or medicines) at least these actually do something.

If alternatives to medicine worked, they wouldn't be alternatives. If you have a problem, go to a REAL DOCTOR.

Disney Land, Disney World, or both?

I think about this issue, and I keep finding myself asking the same questions.

These elderly people who are being scammed. Are they mentally capable of making financial decisions for themselves?

If the answer is yes, then as much as I hate to say it, the lenders are ok. If you sell a bad product, and people buy it knowing what it is, then that's the buyer beware.

If the answer is no, then obviously the lenders are not ok. They're basically stealing money from people who don't realize they are being robbed.

I'm leaning towards the latter, but this opens up all sorts of other questions. If these elderly people can't make their own financial decisions, should they even be allowed to have bank accounts and such? Should they be allowed to drive? Should they be allowed to vote or own homes?

As life expectancies increase, the elderly in our society are becoming a rather large elephant in the room. We need to decide as a society how we are going to balance the dignity and freedom of elderly people against a dangerous world they have an ever increasingly difficult time understanding.

I had that Robo Stalker model. I don't remember it being nearly that ugly. Also, even if it is ugly, it's still a good set toy-wise. The head comes off and is a stand-alone space craft, similar to Mazinger Z. Fun to play with, even if it is ugly.

Also, castle is way better than space.

Lincoln logs and tinker toys.

This may seem cruel, but I vote for the highway. The infrastructure in this country is terrible, and needs to be upgraded very badly. Upgraded infrastructure is something that makes life better for everybody at the expense of only a few. As long as they pay a fair market value for the property, you should have nothing to complain about.

This will even help the struggling economy because it means jobs for the highway construction workers, and it means the supply of houses will go down, and demand for houses will go up.

Us tech people keep complaining about how we have so little bandwidth and such poor wireless service compared to other countries. A large part of that is because of NIMBYS, BANANAS, and opposition to reasonable uses of eminent domain. I say the more building, the better. If we want to achieve great progress we should be building as much as we possibly can, not opposing every single construction project in every single town.

The reason is quite simple. Spammers keep track of how many people click on their e-mails, and which domains they are from. Spammers realize that people using Gmail are pretty unlikely to click on their e-mails because of filters and such. They also realize that Gmail users are much more likely to report abuse, which is what spammers do not want. Spammers are actually better off just filtering out all e-mail addresses @gmail.com.

I think it would be interesting if they compared the spam levels for people who actually have @gmail.com addresses against people with Google for domains.

The original Nissan Skyline GT-R had a similar display. It's not that impressive now, but it was the height of technology at the time. I put the GT-R at the top of the list of cars that need to be made street legal in the US. It's a travesty that we can't get them over here.

Reminds me of my Jimi wallet a bit. I highly recommend it.

On a complete tangent, I have to post anonymously because I lost my BoingBoing password and also the recovery word. How come I can't recover the password with just my e-mail address?

I have seen my future.

The thing is, that despite being closed, the Apple products like iPod and iPhone are just that much better than everything else out there. Every single smartphone every conceived has a useless user interface, except the iPhone.

Even if you take into account the high price, and the "cost" of going through the trouble of hacking it, and dealing with the problems when the hacks break, the iPhone is still better than everything else. It's the same with the iPod. Even if you have to deal with syncing it without iTunes, the iPod is still superior to other players.

Sure, the base feature set of the Apple lineup is sad when compared to say, the Cowon iAudio 7 or the Nokia N95. But it's the details that Apple gets right and everyone else ignores. For example, if you start listening to a podcast in iTunes, then sync your iPod, you will start playing where you left off. Now sync with the iTunes again and you will play where you left off on your iPod.

If you're listening to music on your iPhone, and you get a call, it handles the transitions so smoothly. No having to fumble around for the right buttons to turn the music off and the phone on.

It's the subtle and minor features like that which Apple gets right and nobody else thinks about. Even though I also wish that Apple would open up. I wish it just as much as all the other geeks out there. However, even if you consider just the locked-down feature set, the Apple products are just better.

I mean, consider the iPhone. It is pretty much the only phone that is also a fully featured and decent mp3 player. Right now I have to carry a separate phone and mp3 player. The iPhone is the only device currently available that has the ability to reduce the number of devices I carry by one. Even locked down.

This is why people unlock Apples products rather than purchase say, Linux phones. The Linux phones may be open, but they suck.

This is cool. What would be even cooler would be if you could listen to terrestrial radio live, but with a slight delay of just a few seconds. This is particularly useful for live sporting events. The announcers on the radio are much better than the annoying hacks they get to call the games on TV. However, the radio signal has less of a delay in getting to your house compared to cable or satellite television.

Also, how about removing commercials from the terrestrial radio? That's the #1 reason I stick to podcasts.